Welcome to The Innovation Today podcast where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry Dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation brought to you by service now your partner in digital transformation thank you for joining us today for another episode of The Innovation Today podcast I'm your host Matt metton principal strategic Innovation architect here at service now today we're excited to welcome Dr Ralph altm Consulting director at auno welcome doctor thanks for having me and for giving me the opportunity to talk about U my company and myself excited to have you yeah so I'm looking forward to chatting today about service Ops I know there's more that AO does but first tell us a little bit about yourself and your role okay I'm I'm going to start with the fact that I'm um at AO for over 22 years right now so apart from that giving you a hint for if if you want to guess my age um it's it's also let's let's not do that today okay but um no I I I said that in order to to show that I witnessed a lot of the development that it actually plays in the um delivering of business services and the uh the change that our customers and the customer need actually experience during that the two decades but of course also the the change that my company has has undergone because um yeah when when saying 22 years you probably know that um we have also we had a a pre service now era in our company we switch partnership from another itm Suite provider to service now and that was also a huge change um which I which I experience and I welcome very much right now so my my role in in aine if I might add that is um Consulting director as you said already um Consulting director and also director of for Innovation and my role there is or my specific task is um that I'm head of our so-called product lines we have product lines and they yeah quite off fit to the capabilities that service now has like um it service management it operations management it asset management and so on and I'm like the head of that we also have three cross unit product lines like uh the the platform product line service now platform product line which is um which deals with uh all platform capabilities and we have also a pro business Consulting product line which deals with the analyzing and optimizing of uh processes with our customers and quite new we have an AI product line which deals with AI in general not with the AI capabilities of service now specifically but with AI in generally it's exciting there's a lot of stuff going on yeah yes I I I was thinking it's actually must be quite a view from from where you sit in terms of watching The Evolution not only of it but service now I mean you've watched us from the beginning yes that's right yeah yeah i' love any any insights or thoughts you have on what you've seen and and where you see us heading as well well first of all I'm very fascinated with the speed that um service now is is evolving actually it started as an itm tool and when we switched from that other partner to to service now it it was merely an an itm tool but nowadays um it's it's covering sectors like Po service management human resource um uh customer service Management Field Service management and things like that so it's involving very quickly and it's really yeah in many of those topics it's it's it's reaching a top position like for example in software Asset Management which I'm also involved a bit in they just developed to the to the um to the peak of of um other providers so it's it's quite fascinating it's very cool what are the verticals uh that you're you're working with the most these days if you mean the verticals like the the business capability of service now then we try to cover everything of them um but you probably mean the word it's like the the different industry prac or like yesco whatever yeah yeah actually we're not restricted to any specific vertical um we tried to to cover also lots of verticals there a couple of years ago our our Focus was on manufacturing and finance and still is one of our biggest companies still in the finance sector financial sector but a couple of of years ago we um want won some some big deals and some uh big projects in the public sector which is very interesting and very CH challenging um we did that because our mother company we have a mother company it's called maternal and they have very strong connections to the public sector public authorities in Germany once they switch to service now it's quite natural that we as the the service now company in the in the matna um complex get get the deals with the public sector and that's very interesting as I said before because there's um there huge potentials of course you probably know that in in your in in the M section in Germany Pro um specifically there's lots of gaps in digitization processes so there's lots of potentials to digitize the processes in the public sector but it's also interesting and challenging because of course they have lot of lots of compliances um and lots of policies and lots of regulations and of course they're very keen on um having data security and data privacy and things like that so there are lot of things to consider yeah when it uh in terms of of some of the data privacy and all that I know you mentioned one of your groups is all focused on AI what what are some of the unique challenges that you're facing around data privacy with ai ai is um yeah of course if you if you just if you try to connect somebody in the public sector to let's say open AI chbt they won't do that because they won't allow to to give the data away to the cloud uh without any control and to have the data uh used for learning processes that that's strictly not possible and they they can't do do that so actually they try to to have on Prem Solutions even on Prem Solutions if if possible but if you really yeah can prove that you you stick to to policies data security policies then it's probably also possible to have that in a in a cloud um some of them use actually some kind of a private Cloud it's not not so easy data yeah yeah yeah um when it comes to service Ops what are some of the things you're getting asked from your customers well actually the um when we when we come customers typically we have we have two scenarios one is that digitization is really missing for some processes and the other one is that um the digit processes are not performing very well so they ask us to improve that and the questions they ask then typically are yeah in in two divisions first is user experience they ask us how can we provide a service port portal that is unique um for all the presses that is personalized for a specific person that is just opening or visiting the service portal things like that and how can we optimize the experience for for the customer uh for for the end user as well as you know typically today end users are very keen on on using a self service portal because they want lose control then and typically get very quick results and on the other side self-service Port is very good uh for the IT service provider because then no human being has to be um involved in that that process so it's a win-win situation this is uh the question questions they ask us in in this area how can we do that how can we accomplish that self-service portal how can we accomplish a good user experience and the other two sections process itself process the the most often heared question is actually about best practices how do other customers do that there was quite easy answered in former times when it was merely itm because then you have the the well tried and well established Frameworks like until for so they did not ask how do others do that but they asked for for eil implementation of change management and inent management but it uh it's different when you step uh go a step further um not so far even um like for example in in it asset management software Asset Management there's of course something like um ISO um regulation but it's not that well established it's not that that specific so the processes there are quite demanding um and as as I said before we have uh some customers in the manufacturing branch um and some of these have like yeah over thousand software provider and even more software products and lots of service contract licenses license metrics and things like that so this is really demanding to to manage this amount of of uh products and yeah to have like a budget uh report a budget forecast things like that so then they are asking how do other customers do that how what what do you what would you recommend how we could do that and that's a question in the process and the third area to to finish that is about operating service how can we operate our services um reliably without disturbance how can we stick to the service license agreements how can we measure that is a very often H question because measuring Service delivery is also a topic that is not very well established in in uh most of our customers it's a little bit easier to measure the self-service yes right because I can deliver some content I can you know expose that on a portal and I can see how it's how it's interacting if they've clicked it if they you know all that but yeah I can imagine the other side of that's a little bit challenging yes definitely yeah yeah I do you find when when people are asking you for best practice does it help are you going back in your two decades of of experience or are you are you finding that the curve is changing even even now pretty quickly well actually it's Bose both um um we have of course some experiences since we are yeah for decades in the business right now but on the other hand and that's one of the task of our public um lines uh product lines sorry of our product clients to watch the market to find out about challenging themes about new topics about new methods so we try to keep on top of the wave so to say and be able to consult our our customers that's great that's great so when you when you think of AI back to that which is all the rage these days yes how is AI impacting service Ops in your world well I'm I'm you don't have to restrict it to service op you can talk about it in general how is it impacting you know if that's your main line of business or whatever yeah yes I personally am convinced that that AI is really disruptive it's a disruptive process I mean AI actually have to talk about gen AI then because this is actually the AI that is uh has become famous right now ai um s AI existed a couple of years ago already even in soice now like predictive AI yearsi Ops so there for a while yeah but J know is uh has become famous and yeah it's it's really going to change the world because um and also service operations specifically because it will reduce errors that that are made by human beings it will increase efficiency efficiency dramatically actually and it probably will also be yeah make some some Services possible that that won't be available without AI because um there are so many data to be analyzed um which is too strenuous too um costly if you do that by human beings so there there will be many changes then what do you think about that change in mindset though because there's kind of a side of it where like right now we can go back and we can look for the analytics we can look for the data we can say okay this is the thing we're going to change in our process like we do process mining using Ai and service now so I can see exactly what needs to happen but there's a there's a mind set there's a cultural shift that happens yes as well that people have to get ready for what are you what are you seeing there absolutely I think that there are three different types of person actually we sometimes we see that the the upper management um looks at AI like magic it's it's just there and it works and you don't have to do anything and easy yeah it's easy magic it's quite easy yeah and the technicians um often see that as a challenge a technical challenge um they're trying to to create new models and um to uh do some parameter uning with the models and so they have a very technical mathematical even mathematical view on that and there's still in between crowd so to say there quite often we yeah we notice some some fear about AI because um you know there people are asking themselves is that AI going to kill my job um sure will I will they get rid of me because I'm not no more needed or so these are actually the three types of persons that we that we um yeah experience so from The Innovation side of your role what do you feel like customers are wanting when it comes to AI well geni yeah well actually typically they want to increase efficiency and they they want to be on top of the of the AI movement so to say but quite often we experience that they are not very specific with what they actually require they just want to use AI we have actually some questions like how can we use AI can can you tell me how how we can use AI so very unspecific maybe it is um yeah related to some kind of process um for example user ha desk is is typically something that they want to increase the efficiency with AI but they're really unspecific about that and this is actually why we established that public U sorry product line yeah the product line AI because this product line is is um creating a product with AI uh which we call right now ai journey and which um starts actually before implementing AI with with service now because some there are some steps that have to be fulfilled before for example um the first step if if the customer is not already is um to make the customer AI ready right which means make him understand how AI works and what can AI do and what can AI not do and then go ahead step by step until they really have ai working it feels like I mean gen is kind of helping some companies get around this but it feels like there's a lot of companies that are wanting this revolution yes but now they're uncovering the fact that their data is in a very bad state and their their architecture is off and yeah so how do you guys approach that in your Consulting yeah well that's actually the next step after being AI ready um the next step in our AI journey is then to analyze the data to find out what has to be done to improve the data because quite often data is not sufficient and yeah we all know everybody has um some experience with AI knows that AI does not work without data so you have to to have the data and actually service now is very helpful the customers that use service now already have the data quite often available but if not like if they're using any other system well let's take for an example Incident Management process where they just document incident but then start a conversation bya email and close the incident after that and don't have data about the information that that was in between um then that data is probably lost and um you can't analyze that data and um so AI is not working in that case correct it might ultimately but you have to change the process yes to then find it that's one of the other things that I think we're seeing within the just the larger ecosystem of service now is a lot of this excitement around gen is going to help us come up with even better processes that we couldn't have thought about yeah because we're looking at it like here's the problem here's the solution if you zoom out a little bit then you could find other other opportunities which is really exciting definitely in terms of just resistance to change how do you think how do you think organizations can prepare for that resistance mindset because it we are definitely entering a phase where I have you know a lot of people are excited about gen some are not yeah so those who are not what would you what would you say to them how would you encourage them well actually we do we we did that already before uh we started the AI Journey because that that resistency also appears in other um in other areas like for example in the the HR where You' got a lot of people which are not working with it directly and there's often um resist reluctancy about um changing process and changing the tool and having a different it so it's not specific to AI so the methods we we're using is um already come from from there and what we're doing of course we first make yeah kind of a stakeholder analysis identifying those those people who are reluctant to the project or even hostile to the project and identifying those people who are supportive and what is their influence and things like that so this is a classical stakeholder analysis and then we're trying to provide a vision and to make the targets very clear and then we quite often collaborate uh with a sister company um it's a TMT it's also a daughter of matna um and they're specialized on um organizational changes and they are doing media multimedia so what they quite often do and this is for example a product that we created in the har a product product line a set of videos yeah to really motivate the the people um and have them you know uh build up emphasize emphasis emphasis emphasize emphasize yeah okay emphasized toward that uh vision and to make them the targets very clear and then of course it's quite often that's also the case with AI that different departments in the the company have to work together so a method then is uh bridging teams like um identifying stakeholders and different teams and bringing them together making them discuss about the the topic and so step by step I think we're winning the people and they get convinced I mean uh providing videos is quite the same that you did in the knowledge 24 the day in the Keynotes there were also a couple of videos like to to motivate the people and to draw the big pictures and that's that's very helpful that's what we're doing as well uh one of the things I was I was curious about when it comes to Innovation and and some of the the topics we've been having if you could fast forward two three years what do you think is is around the corner for service Ops what do you think is is around the corner for your customers and what they're yeah they're going after well I think um AI is is um of course gaining speed and I I will be part I think two or three years will be part of about any process um making the process very much efficiently and very much effectively also as well but I also think that that probably the yeah when it comes to service portal that probably many different servic will will look much more similar like for for the user for example if if I would would would say it's very traumatically it's there's actually no difference in ordering a hamburger or ordering car in the first case you're ordering tomato and salad and uh and beef and the other in the other case you're ordering a specific color or the black leather seats or whatsoever so I mean the process is pretty much the same at least from the end user experience of course under the hood the the processes will will for of course you have some more approvals for the car than for the hamburger probably W uh buy a car every every night once you're hungry but I think the the the service experience for for the user will get will become very very smooth very similar and very easy to to use and that's also probably due to AI because AI is is very good in in directing the path not ordering hamburger but ordering the car and establishing some some roots and some some yeah mechanisms that that will support the process that yeah that's cool yeah so I think uh one one other question might be you know in terms of customers that you worked with recently how do you kind of is there an example is there something that you've done recently or project you've been involved with that kind of shows where things are heav headed with a AO yeah well I can give you an example in um out of the finance financial sector um that I mentioned earlier which is one of our biggest customer still that's an IT provider for lots of banks in Germany they have like more over 600 banks in Germany and are operating the it for for the banks like operating um almost all of the ATMs for their Banks um and providing software U which are needed to to uh create loans and things like that so um they have lots of customers and this is a very interesting customer when it comes to service operations because different banks of of their customers have different needs and they have also different contracts and they have a huge service catalog with a couple of hundred Services they offer like yeah everything that has to do with with it operating from workplace to to server they they need at the bank um to to cloud services whatsoever so they have a huge service catalog and couple of years ago they were operating that with that other it service management we won't talk about yes talk about exactly they could not handle that anymore because um it was very um complicated also for the customers um to find the right service and um after the customer found the right service then it was very comp licated for the IT service provider or customer um to provide that service and even more complicated to actually charge that service because they did not know how much effort they they put in that in that service provision what they what they did and they changed the service now it was quite it took quite a time because um we had to analyze the service catalog and um to categorize the services and to build new groups so that the service is much more transparent to the customers and then find some mechanisms how they can plan the service is know be very specific when when they could let's say deliver a notebook um and also to calculate the cost for that for the customer so that was a very demanding project and uh but we succeeded and they they're really satisfied with service now and the customer also satisfied that was quite a good um example for a good project and um yeah for having a good solution to service now compared to the previous solution then and I'm guessing it was pretty fairly out of box right like it it was fairly I mean there wasn't a whole lot of customization in that right St straightforward of what we do yeah I mean there was some some customization when it comes to the calculation of the cost but that's not not that much the service catalog is out of the box actually so um there's not much um customized on not not anything customized at all from service catalog exciting well is there anything else you'd like to add probably I'm I'd like to add that Al also that I've been uh for 22 years in that in that c in that area I'm still very proud to be here and very uh interested and very keen on seeing what's what's going on in in the next couple of years and I'm very confident that Serv now is doing a very good job and wolving at light speed during the couple of next uh of years so exciting very fine uh what knowledge is this for you what knowledge yeah how many knowledges have you been to well actually I've I've been only um in that's the second one okay been here in 2018 yeah when John danu was the CEO then um that's the second one nice so yeah you've probably seen a lot of changes since the last uh six years right yes yes right in the meantime I've been at the emia forums yes exact yeah and um I've also been in the during the pandemic there there was not the central um knowledge but um I've been I've been there as well but it's the second time that I've been at I've been at the central knowledge in the Las Vegas it was wonderful to meet you uh thanks so much for joining us today Ralph and it's been very informative thank you to all our listeners Please Subscribe and share if you like what you heard today be sure to join us for our next episode [Music]